David Drake - When the Tide Rises

"Admiral Leary," said Hoppler of theIndependence. It and theDeMarce were accelerating to gain useful velocity that they could multiply in the Matrix. "Because of a serious leak in my reaction mass tanks, I'm forced to return to Pelosi for repairs. I hope to greet you there soon on your arrival so that we can plan further operations against the common enemy. Hoppler out."

Sun turned from his console with a look of anguish on his face. "Mistress!" he said to Adele. "They're rats, they're running out on us! Can I ring their bell while they're still this side of the Matrix?"

"You may not," Adele said sharply. She didn't bother to say that the question was beyond her authority: itwasn't beyond her authority, her real authority at least. There wasn't a Sissie who wouldn't do as Mistress Mundy ordered, Daniel included. "We'll serve them out later, Sun, but not in that fashion."

She wasn't sure precisely how they'd even the score. Daniel wasn't the sort to send Hogg and Tovera to assassinate the captains who'd ignored his orders and fled. He wouldn't ask Lady Mundy to challenge the cowards to duels, either; but if he did ask that, she'd shoot Hoppler, Seward and the rest of them down with as little compunction as she'd killed a hundred other men and women in the course of her duty.

It didn't bother her in the least while she was doing it: she saw only a blur in her sight picture. The features didn't appear until late into the darkness, when the dead came to speak with her again.

TheDeMarce faded from the PPI; theIndependence was already gone and so were most of the light craft. TheForsyte 14 suddenly reappeared within the display, but that was simply because it hadn't had enough velocity in the sidereal universe to get any distance even with the help of the Matrix. It was accelerating at what appeared to be its maximum rate, now, and it didn't reply to Adele's attempts to raise it on short wave and laser. She didn't imagine that any response the captain made would be a useful one, of course, but she thought she ought to try.

"Ladouceur, this is Squadron Six," Daniel said. Adele thought he sounded weary, but that could be an artifact of the freighter's commo system. "TheColumbineis coming alongside. Mister Liu, have Captain Julian's riggers ready to transfer back aboard, if you will. Six out ."

Adele's algorithms caught the disruption of a ship extracting from the Matrix before the cruiser's own did, but only moments before: theLadouceur might be old, but she was a warship which'd been constructed and equipped to serve in the foremost navy of the human universe. Software had improved since then, but the real question has always been the skill of the person using the apparatus rather than the apparatus itself.

"Squadron Six!" Adele said. TheColumbine certainly didn't have the sort of electronics Daniel would need to deal with this, and she didn't imagine there'd be time for him to reboard the cruiser. Could she transfer the necessary data to him using the freighter's single-head laser transceiver? "A heavy ship's entered sidereal space three hundred… and six thousand miles from Churchyard. It's not one of our squadron. It's-oh."

She paused for a moment as she crosschecked the data cascading in from the new arrival; her data were entirely consistent. There hadn't been time yet for an optical identification, but Adele trusted her signals intelligence farther anyway.

"Daniel," she said, her voice clipped from embarrassment at having given a needless alarm, "the ship is theZwiedam, a former immigrant transport now owned by the Free State of Skye. I believe this is-"

"Skye Defendercalling Admiral Leary," announced the new arrival over tight-beam microwave. Adele relayed the message to theColumbine over the laser link. "This is Colonel Raymond Chatterjee reporting as ordered, over."

"Colonel, this is Squadron Six," Daniel replied with a cheerful bounce that hadn't been in his voice a moment before. "I'll be aboard my flagship inside half an hour. We'll shape course to some place we can discuss matters in greater comfort than I suspect you and your troops find in vacuum. Hold what you've got till then, if you don't mind."

In an even more ebullient tone he added, "I'm very glad of your arrival, Colonel. I think we'll now be able to turn the present bag of lemons into lemonade! Six out."

The bush above Colonel Chatterjee's head shrilled like a steam whistle. He spun around, holding his briefcase in front of himself reflexively. His troops and the spacers mixing in the dry scrub weren't carrying sidearms, but quite a number of them reached into pockets or under floppy jackets.

"Ah, very good!" Daniel said, stepping forward. He took a large checked handkerchief from the hip pocket of his utilities and spread it between his hands. With his attention focused wholly on the bush, he added, "I saw it this time."

He snatched, enveloping a thin branch in the handkerchief, and pulled it carefully away. A lump in the fabric was kicking, and one of the shoots which'd angled from the branch a moment ago was missing.

"See?" Daniel said, carefully opening his makeshift capture net. A brown creature no bigger than his little finger writhed for a moment, then stood upright on the four tiny legs on its broader end. He could feel them gripping the palm of his hand beneath the cloth. "My, I don't suppose there's been a proper zoological survey of this place, has there?"

"There has not," Adele said from where she sitting twenty feet away. Her personal data unit was on the table; the air above it quivered with imagery that Daniel couldn't make out from his angle. "Not that I can find, at any rate. I don't even swear that the planet's name is Dansant, since the Kostroman who located the place may not have been the original discoverer as he believed he was."

"Surely that doesn't matter, does it?" Colonel Chatterjee said with a slight frown. "It hasn't been colonized and there doesn't appear to be any reason it should be colonized. I thought we were just landing here to have firm ground under our feet while we held discussions?"

Yes, thought Daniel. And also so that Woetjans and Sun can assess how good your troops really are.

"Quite right," he said aloud, returning the creature to its branch. He had to rub his handkerchief against the bark to get the little fellow to release and hop back where it belonged. There were times he wished he could put all his efforts into natural history; there were such wonders here among the stars!

But that'd mean giving up all that it meant to be a member of the RCN. No number of branch-hoppers and six-winged flyers and carnivorous flowers that crept onto their prey could make up for the thrill of seeing your missiles on a course converging with that of an enemy ship.

Several of Pasternak's people had tack-welded an interior partition to a pair of empty cable spools to make a table. They'd brought three chairs out of theLaddie 's wardroom and set them all along one long side as Daniel had directed. Overhead, riggers had strung an awning of sailcloth between sections of beryllium shroud. Untensioned, the rigging would flex, but it was more than stiff enough to stand upright while supporting something as light as the microns-thin fabric.

"Take the chair to the right of Officer Mundy, Colonel," Daniel directed, "and we'll get down to business."

Dansant, if that was really its name, wasn't a very prepossessing place; that was no doubt why it hadn't been colonized. The atmosphere was breathable but very arid. There was no standing water and no rainfall; the local plants used their fibrous bark to absorb minuscule amounts of condensate during the night, then closed up tightly at dawn to avoid drying out again.

That much from the discoverer's notes which Adele had copied in the Kostroman archives while she was employed there. She'd brought the data out now, years later, because Daniel had needed a habitable world within twenty-four hours' distance of Churchyard.